Sunday, January 6, 2013

WHAT IS GNOME?



GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software .It is mainly developed by Red Hat employees. GNOME was founded with the goal of promoting software freedom  It is an international project that includes creating software development frameworks, selecting application software for the desktop, and working on the programs that manage application launching, file handling, and window and task management.
GNOME is part of the GNU Project and can be used with various Unix-like operating systems, most notably GNU/Linux and as part of OpenSolaris Desktop. GNOME was started in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena as a free software project to develop a desktop environment and applications for it

A number of language bindings are available, allowing applications to be written in a variety of programming languages, such as C++ (gtkmm), Java (java-gnome), Ruby (ruby-gnome2), C# (Gtk#), Python (PyGObject), Perl (gtk2-perl), Tcl (Gnocl) and many others. The only languages currently used in applications that are part of an official GNOME desktop release are C, C++, Python, Vala and Javascript. A number of build-scripts (such as JHBuild or GARNOME) are available to help automate the process of compiling the source code.The running of GNOME is mainly based on the donations received from its users.


Until the release of GNOME 3.0, GNOME was designed around the traditional computing desktop metaphor. Users can change the appearance of their desktop through the use of themes, which usually consist of an icon set, a window manager border and GTK+ theme engine and parameters. The current default theme is Adwaita. The Human Interface Guidelines help developers to produce applications that look and behave similarly to each other, which provides a cohesive GNOME experience.

The applications that are provided with the GNOME Desktop share several characteristics. For example, the applications have a consistent look-and-feel. The applications share characteristics because the applications use the same programming libraries. An application that uses the standard GNOME programming libraries is called a GNOME-compliant application. For example, Nautilus and the gedit text editor are GNOME-compliant applications.

GNOME provides libraries in addition to the libraries provided by your operating system. The libraries enable GNOME to run your existing applications as well as GNOME-compliant applications. 

The other desktop environments similar to GNOME are KDE and XFCE





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